“Nah, I don’t touch the stuff. Tastes like piss to me.”
“I’m intrigued at your choice of comparison, though I don’t want to know how you came to that particular conclusion. Do you drink at all?”
“Not at home. It’s illegal in Marrakesh.”
“But you travel a great deal. Surely outside your country…?”
Syfax shrugged. “I do like sweet liquors. And I had something called mead once. Made from honey. Better than beer, but not by much.”
“What about vodka?” Nicola flagged down the barkeep and had him fetch a bottle and a pair of glasses. She poured the clear liquor.
“What is it?” Syfax sniffed his glass and the vapor stung his nostrils.
“It’s from the land of Rus originally, but now you can find it everywhere in the north. They make it from potatoes, if you believe that. It’s not sweet, but I think you’ll warm to it.” She swallowed her glass in one gulp.
Not to be outdone, Syfax imitated her and almost choked on the burning in his throat, but he held it back and managed a grin. “You drink this for fun?”
“No, I drink it to get drunk, major. When you live in a climate like this, some nights are best spent with your brain on fire, burning your blood from the inside out. Another?” She had already refilled her glass.
Syfax nodded. Soon the bottle was half empty and the major felt his skin burning and his head swimming. She was right about one thing, he thought. This is better than being wet and cold in a hellhole like this. He thumped his glass and the Italian woman poured him another. She was smiling almost constantly now, and she had shifted her chair a bit closer to his to lean over the table toward him.
At the far end of the room, a woman with a husky voice yelled out, “Whoever thinks he’s man enough to lie between my legs can line up right here, right now!”
Syfax leaned over sharply to see who was making the offer, but his blood cooled rather quickly at the sight of the woman by the door. She was tall enough and trim enough, but too ugly, even to his weak eyes. A wide mouth, a jagged beak of a nose, and an eye patch surrounded by twisted, scarred flesh. Syfax had never thought himself very picky when it came to women, but he was feeling picky now at the sight of her. Still, a knot of drunken Espani soon formed around her and she herded them off to a corner, and within a few minutes men were queuing up to arm- wrestle each other for the privilege of bedding the hatchet-faced woman.
Syfax shared another shot with Nicola, and another after that. Through a gap in the crowd, he saw the one- eyed woman had taken off her coat to reveal her muscular shoulders and scarred arms. Suddenly she looked a bit more appealing, and the longer he studied the line of men trying to prove their strength and stamina for her, the more he started to think he ought to be in that line himself.
Who cares if she only has one eye? I bet she’s a demon in the dark.
Still, he knew he was drunk and tired and had to deal with a sick, whiny lieutenant in the morning as well as this leering Italian woman who was looking more and more like his dead uncle with every sip of liquor. Nicola edged forward. He edged back.
The feats of strength in the corner evolved from arm-wrestling to gut-punching to all-out fighting in just a few minutes and Syfax grimaced at the three men at the center of the brawl. Big fellas. Gonna be trouble. And I’m drunk, damn it. He didn’t want to deal with them. He hoped they didn’t move any closer to…
The tangled fighters stumbled into the table right in front of the major, shoving Nicola back in her chair and destroying the table top, vodka bottle, and glasses. But they missed Syfax’s knees by an inch, leaving the major to sit, unperturbed, looking down at the two men grappling on his boots.
Nah, I’m not that drunk.
He leaned forward and smashed his fist through the closer man’s jaw, sending him to a quiet oblivion. The second man stared down at his unconscious opponent in confusion, and then looked up at the major just in time to get a knee in the chest. Syfax slipped out of his chair, shocked at how fluidly the entire building seemed to be sliding to his left, but when he focused on the gasping man in front of him, the tilting room disappeared. Syfax grabbed the man’s shirt and smashed his forehead through the other man’s nose. Done properly, there should have been very little pain. He did it sloppily, yet came away as clear as bell. The other man collapsed, dead to the world.
Syfax lurched up on his rubbery legs and noticed Nicola tugging insistently on his sleeve. He wrenched his arm away. “What? What? What? Get off me, lady. It’s over.”
Nicola pointed across the room. “I’m not sure that it is, major.”
Syfax followed her pointing finger. Oh, right. The third guy.
The third man wasn’t as obviously drunk as the first two, which was probably why he had the good sense to the let the other two beat each other bloody so he could claim the evening’s prize. The prize in question was standing on a chair with one boot planted on a table, her scarred arms crossed under her breasts, a cruel smile on her wide black lips. Seeing her there, proudly watching her suitors fight like mad dogs just to lick her boots, Syfax found that she wasn’t nearly as ugly as she had been a short while. He didn’t even mind that she only had one eye or the scars around the patch.
He was still admiring her leg mounted on the table top when the third man plowed into his belly and slammed him against the wall. The room whirled and crashed onto its side and Syfax felt something cool and wet sloshing in the back of his throat, but when his skull bounced off the wood panel of the wall, everything snapped back into focus. He swallowed the remains of his liquid supper and brought both fists down on the man still trying to crush him against the wall.
It took two hammer blows to the man’s back to get him to let go, and then Syfax shoved forward, driving the man off balance over the broken remains of the table and the two men lying on the floor. With a wide-eyed look of surprise, the third man slipped and fell back over the other two and his head landed on the shattered vodka bottle. He clutched his bleeding scalp and rolled away toward the bar. After a moment of hissing through clenched teeth, he staggered up to his feet, cast a few dirty looks at Syfax, and shoved his way out the door.
“Major, that was fantastic.” Nicola was suddenly standing very close to him.
Standing side by side, he realized that they were exactly the same height. He also realized that he had never looked directly into a woman’s eyes without looking down before. The novelty of the moment made him queasy. The lady’s square jaw and small eyes didn’t help.
“What’s your name, big man?” The one-eyed woman jumped down and sauntered across the room toward him. “I noticed you and those big arms of yours the minute I came in, but you didn’t even come over to say hello.” She wrapped her wiry arms around his waist.
He looked down at her, relieved to be looking at a woman at the correct angle, and the firm pressure of her breasts against his ribs more than made up for the eye patch and scarring on the side of her face. He smiled as he slipped his arm around her. “What say you and me find something to lie on?”
She grinned wickedly.
As they stomped down the back hall, slightly off balance, Syfax had a brief moment of distracted thought in which he wondered where the Italian woman had vanished to when his new companion had appeared. And as relieved as he was by his change of admirers, he couldn’t help but wonder whether he might have gotten both of them to come back with him together.
They entered a room, kicked the door shut, and crashed onto the bed in the dark, her lips already pressed hard to his, her tongue furiously exploring his mouth as her hands whipped her shirts off and went to loosen her belt. He raced to keep up, hurling away clothes and kicking off boots, which clattered against the walls wherever they broke free. His belt hit the floor like a rock, the sheathed hunting knife landing edge up. Syfax kicked it under the bed and heard the steely clangor of more knives hitting the floorboards as the woman climbed out of her pants and tackled him onto the rough wool blankets.
As she sat astride him, writhing and battering at his hips, he had a brief moment to congratulate himself on his good fortune. In the dark, he could bare see her face at all, but her bare breasts hung smooth and firm in his hands, and that was all that really mattered. She rode him hard, grunting sharply with every thrust, sometimes sitting up straight and sometimes falling forward with her hands planted on his shoulders, her nails digging into his skin, her teeth biting into her wide bottom lip.
Syfax arched his back, straining to keep up with her, straining to stay in control, but she had taken control from the moment they fell into bed and he was only there to be ridden until he couldn’t be ridden anymore.
His climax lasted a long moment, and he pulled her hips tight against his to make it last as long as he could, but then it was over and his attention quickly shifted to a sharp pain in his back. But she wasn’t done. She grunted
